Paranoid

Written in minutes as filler to round out an album, this became the most enduring three minutes Black Sabbath recorded, and its accidental origin shows in the best way — everything is stripped to essentials. Tony Iommi's riff is a fast, single-note gallop rather than the doom crawl the band was building its reputation on, driven by Bill Ward's frantic ride cymbal and Geezer Butler's bass locked in unison. Ozzy Osbourne's voice, thin and nasal and slathered in that early-70s Rodger Bain flatness, sits high in the mix like an alarm going off. The lyric, written by Butler, is not about paranoia in the clinical sense but about depression — a man who has "finished with my woman 'cause she couldn't help me with my mind," who tells you plainly that he cannot feel joy, that happiness is something he watches other people have. In 1970 Britain, that flat admission of unreachable numbness was almost unheard of in popular music, and it lands harder than any occult imagery on the album. The gap between the song's manic tempo and its emptied-out interior is the whole point. It suits the specific restlessness of being unable to sleep and unable to explain why.